Red~White~Blue

I’m an obsessive person – you all have realized that by now haven’t you?

HeartStrings is working on RWB blocks and Chinese coins between Memorial Day and July 4th so I made 20 blocks and sent them to Sue to be included in group quilts.

Then I read about Alycia’s project which has grown from 100 Quilts of Valor to a goal of 400 Quilts of Valor for 2009 and thought that’s perfect – She’s a HeartStrings member – we can help her reach her goal. So I pulled out my bin with RWB fabric that I’d gathered from stash 6 months ago and pieced my RWB Rails.

Since I still have a ton of fabric from that bin (currently all over the floor of my sewing room) I decided I need to do at least one more top and took about 1o minutes to flip through a couple of my books looking for ideas and came up with 5 possibilities (good thing I didn’t look any longer than 10 minutes).

I hope you all will think about making a quilt for Alycia’s project and you may even have these books at home to choose from….or you can look on my MaryQuilts.com site for some free instructions.

The first two potential quilts are from the book Hooked on Triangles by Johannessen and Uren and are done in black, white, red ….easy enough to change to RWB. They’re a little small but there are directions for making a 12 inch block versus an 8 inch block which works.

This one is in the book Sew One and You’re Done by Evelyn Sloppy and while it’s a square quilt – some creative borders could bring it up to size and rectangular. I don’t care much for square quilts – they seem awkward to me. The color scheme on this one is already RWB too.

Here’s one from the book Mile-A-Minute Quilts by Sharon Hultgren (no it’s not made from crumbs!). Now looking at the block in the top right corner you can see this is made from diamonds….I don’t think so…….but a simple Sawtooth Star would work just as well. This one’s already in RWB too.

And finally, the one I’ve chosen to work on is a combination/variation of quilts from two books. The technique to make the block is from Sally Schneider’s book Triangle Tricks and the inspiration quilt is in the Quick Quilts from your Scrap Bag by Leisure Arts and done in Christmas colors of red, green, and white…easy enough to make that RWB!

Since Keith’s only home for about 12 hours before leaving for a week, I’m not going to run up to the sewing room to start this right away but I can design my EQ layout and finish up the binding on the Lizard quilt while sitting here with him.